Transcript

Comparable to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, thousands of Buddhist and secular manuscripts dating from the 8th to the 10th Century were accidentally discovered by a monk in 1900 when he opened a hidden door of a cave. The Head of the Dunhuang Project at the British Library, Susan Whitfield tells the story.

Rachael Kohn: Where do you think the earliest printed document in the world was found?

Hello, this is The Ark, on Radio National, and I'm Rachael Kohn.

If you guessed China, you'd be right. A very large cache of the oldest printed paper documents were found in a small town called Dunhuang on the Silk Road. In a cave complex, resembling an ancient library, Buddhist monks and nuns kept their sacred texts, and today scholars are still poring over them.

Susan Whitfield is the Director of the Dunhuang Project at the British Library, and she's recently published a book called Life Along the Silk Road. It's one of the best introductions to this critically important cultural artery, where all the known religions would eventually meet. Susan Whitfield is speaking to me from London.

Susan Whitfield: Dunhuang was a fantastic find. It was a garrison town dating back about 2,000 years in the western part of what is now Gansu Province in China. If you're thinking of north of Tibet in western China, South Mongolia, around there in the sort of Gobi Desert, Dunhuang was a Buddhist centre, and there was a big monastery there made of 500, 1000 caves in its heyday. And one cave was filled with manuscripts, printed documents and paintings on silk.

It seems to have been a Buddhist library, and it was sealed in about 1000 AD. Once this little cave had been filled, it was covered over and hidden until 1900 when it was rediscovered. Completely unique because it's the only Buddhist library we have from that period, it's the largest, earliest paper archive, it has the earliest printed books in the world. It's a fantastic resource, and I should say that even though it's mainly Buddhist, there are many signs of other religions and of secular life, and many other documents, legal, social, economic, women's clubs, many, many other things there.

That's not to say that other Silk Road sites from other towns on the Silk Road, because there were many settlements on the Silk Road thriving in the first millennium, that's not to say that they didn't also yield wonderful finds. And we have military documents for example on wood from a southern Silk Road town called Miran, Tibetan military documents. We have details of life from northern Silk Road towns, and some other Buddhist documents in early Indian languages and scripts from towns further west. So the whole of the Silk Road yielded important documents, but Dunhuang was unique because of its size and completeness.

Rachael Kohn: Do we know why the cave was sealed up at Dunhuang?

Susan Whitfield: No, that's a mystery to us all. There's been various theories propounded. We think it was sealed about 1000 AD because that's the last date a document comes from about that period, and some early scholars suggested it was because of invasions of the Tangut peoples who formed a big empire there around that time. But in fact the Tanguts were Buddhist, so there's no reason why a cave would be sealed.

There's been other suggestions that it was because of other invading armies coming from the west, or from the south. But it seems to have been a sacred repository, put there for ex library copies of Buddhist sutras which you couldn't destroy because they were sacred. So even the monastery library which had a sutra got a new copy, so to speak, and discarded its old copy. It wouldn't get rid of it, it wouldn't destroy it. So this cave seems to have been a place where old copies of Buddhist scriptures were placed for safe keeping, and perhaps it just became full and was sealed up just to remain there.

Rachael Kohn: And the number of scrolls and parchments? How many approximately?

Susan Whitfield: Approximately 40,000 to 60,000. Now that sounds very vague but we're still counting, because the unfortunate thing about this find was that it was dispersed. You mentioned foreign archaeological activity in the area, and indeed there were lots of archaeologists from various countries visiting there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the find was dispersed to several major institutions, and they're all still struggling to catalogue and count.

Rachael Kohn: The Chinese were pretty willing to sell these scrolls to the European Sinologists and archaeologists; I wonder why they were regarded with so little reverence?

Susan Whitfield: Well at that time, you must remember, the political situation was that west China was practically in civil war. It wasn't really very much under firm central control at that time, it was a bit of a lawless area. The Chinese government did give the archaeologists travel documents and permission to take material out. China wasn't a Buddhist country at that time, and the government probably didn't realise the importance of these finds. Of course it did itself send an envoy to the caves in 1910 to clear what was remaining in the caves, and that cache of manuscripts are now in the National Library of China.

Rachael Kohn: Well it seems some of the merchants were not above creating facsimiles of documents and selling them as authentic. Are scholars today still trying to decide between authentic and sort of ersatz materials?

Susan Whitfield: Well facsimile is a very polite word I think for outright forgeries, yes. Of Dunhuang we're not sure how many forgeries there are, but there certainly are forgeries. The picture is complicated.

In Chinese history and also in Buddhism, it's considered an act of faith or an act of reverence to copy a sutra, to copy a sacred text, and so many sutras may have been copied by devout lay Buddhists or monks and then later come on to the market and been sold as originals. But having said that, there were definitely and maybe still are definitely people making forgeries for sale on the market.

We do have a wonderful story in the 1880s there was a couple of men in the town of Khotan on the southern Silk Road, the place which produces wonderful jade of course. Islam Akhun and his accomplice, who started producing so-called old books which they sold to the British and the Russian Consuls in Kashgar, a market town in the west of China, as originals. They said they found them in the desert ruins. This was very early and nobody really knew what old books from that region looked like at this time, and that Russian and British Consuls bought many of these little old books with this squiggly writing on it which nobody could decipher, and they sent them back to London and to St Petersburg, and when the books arrived in London a scholar came across them and he was so terribly excited because he thought he'd discovered an unknown language, and he spent several years trying to decipher it.

It was very soon that people started expressing doubts about these documents, but this scholar was so keen to discover this language that he didn't really listen to them. It shows how we want to believe something, we ignore all the evidence to the contrary.

Anyway in 1900, archaeologists went out and he found Islam Akhun, and he sat him down in front of a bright light and interrogated him for two days and eventually got him to admit to just making these documents up, and this man Islam Akhun said Well at first I tried to make the writing look sensible, but after a while I realised that these foreigners would buy anything, so I just used little woodblocks, which I just dipped in ink and printed, and did repeats of all the little squiggles on my woodblocks, and then they burnt them over fire and poured stuff over them to make them look old. And amassed I should think, quite a tidy sum.

Rachael Kohn: Indeed, what a cruel joke. Susan I can't think of a more romantic and adventurous setting for storytelling than the Silk Road, and in effect, that's what you've done in your book, Life Along the Silk Road. You've managed to bring alive in a very personal way, this very complex region of warring tribes and empires and different religions through the lives of particular individuals. How did you choose them?

Susan Whitfield: For a start I should say that I did it this way because I think the Silk Road is enormously complicated. When I first started reading about it, I would read two pages of a history and already been lost by the plethora of unknown geographical names and peoples from the past and cultures and tribes who no longer are recognised. And I thought the only way to get it across to a general audience was by telling individual stories which could bring in the history by default, so to speak. So how do I choose these people? Well some of them are historical figures found in the manuscripts from Dunhuang and the other places, and they chose themselves. For example, the man who makes almanacs, The Official's Tale, is a well-known figure in Dunhuang and we have quite a good biography for him from all the documents in the cave.

But then I also wanted to show other facets of life, such as monks and nuns of different religions, and merchants, and we haven't got such complete life stories of any individuals from these documents. So I sort of made a composite character from various documents that we have. So really I was just trying to choose characters that would give an insight into different facets of life, that were important on the Silk Road at the time.

Rachael Kohn: Well I'd like to ask you about the Buddhist nun who became an Abbess. It's fascinating to read because you convey so much about Buddhist monastic life in this simple tale of an old nun who recalls her life as she lays dying on her sick bed. What kind of sources did you use specifically for her?

Susan Whitfield: Well we have her will, so the nun, Miaofu is a historical character and we have a copy of her will which came from the cave at Dunhuang. So the bit that I quote from her will about her leaving various parts of her property to different people, is a historical document. And then I wanted to discuss what it was like to be a female cleric at that time. Of course we have the official Buddhist texts which lay down the rules for Buddhist monastic life, but when you start looking at other documents at Dunhuang, things like wills or nuns and monks, things like contracts which one of the party lending money perhaps as a monk or a nun, things like women's clubs who met at monasteries; you realise that monastic life was quite at variance with the rules laid down.

So for example, in Buddhist rules, nuns and monks are not meant to own any personal property, but it's quite clear that they did. And you can build up quite a good picture, as indeed several scholars have done before me quite well, and I was relying on a lot of excellent secondary scholarship in this field from Chinese, Japanese and western colleagues. You can build up quite a picture of what it was actually like to live as a monk or a nun in the area at this time.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, it was quite interesting, because Miaofu had certain qualms about what she had done in her life. She knew that she hadn't quite stuck to the rules as much as she had hoped when she was young, so at the end of her life she wondered whether she would - well she hoped she would not go to one of the hells.

Susan Whitfield: Yes. Well I think the interesting thing about writing about people is that I really do believe that the human condition is the same throughout history, so even the historical facts and circumstances in context might change, the worries we have, the fears we have, the hopes we have are the same from era to era. And somebody who starts out as young and idealistic determined to live a certain sort of life, and then finds her ideals slightly eroded over time, so that by the time she comes to the end of her life she realises that she hasn't quite fulfilled what she set out to do, I think is very common, especially among people with very strong faith who try to live a religious life.

Of course Miaofu herself was not bad, she did live as a cleric and generally carried out Buddhist precepts. There were many other clergy who were far less diligent in their faith than she was For example, we know of monks who got married and had families and lived quite ordinary secular lives, despite being ordained monks at that time.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, there was quite a bit of compromise it seems in the story of Miaofu for example, she was quite conscious of the need to maintain an interdependence with the community who would after all make donations during the Ghost Festival so she had to be very careful about how she treated the locals.

Susan Whitfield: Well I think even now we see that the church is part of the community, and if individual churches of whatever denomination or faith are concerned to build up their wealth and influence in the community, then they have to, their leaders often have to be quite political animals, and we see this with Miaofu who has to quite often play a public relations role if you like, going and soothing bad feelings among different people, being careful. I mean the case you mention is she has to go and speak to a nun who's causing trouble in the nunnery and yet whose mother is a very influential and rich member of the community; she doesn't want to alienate the family because they will be important for giving donations to the monastery, to the nunnery over time.

Rachael Kohn: As you say, the human condition is the same 1,000 years later. Well I found it a most engaging book, thank you so much for coming on to The Ark.

Susan Whitfield: It was a great pleasure, thank you.

Rachael Kohn: Susan Whitfield's book is called Life Along the Silk Road.

THEME

Guests

Dr Susan Whitfield

runs the International Dunhuang Project at the British Library. She has written several books including China: A Literary Companion.